Our thanks to R for pointing us to this. At the end of the short piece there’s a link to a video (16:17) of Jonathon Conte, recorded in 2011.

I bring some very welcome news. William Collins, a British blogger, will be attending the London conference.

In my view, and that of many others, William has set the gold standard in relation to in-depth pieces about individual gender-related issues. His website is here.

You have only two weeks left, until 12:00 GMT, Sunday, 5 June, to order your conference ticket(s) – here. We’ve sold a number of tickets in the past 24 hours alone, and anticipate selling out before the deadline.

Four years ago AVfM published my piece titled, ‘He who pays the piper, calls the tune. Or does he?’ It was an analysis following the discovery that in the 2010/11 tax year, men paid £108.0 billion of the government’s £151.6 billion income tax receipts (71.2%), while women paid just £43.6 billion (28.8%). The income tax gender gap that year was £64.4 billion. We’ve been following the issue ever since.

The state’s numerous assaults on the human rights of men and boys, as outlined in our 2015 general election manifesto, happen despite men paying the majority of income tax collected in the country. Income tax is the largest single source of government tax revenue.

The income tax gender gap increased in each of the three years following the 2010/11 tax year.

So, what of the latest year for which we have gendered data, 2014/15? The relevant Table from the ONS is here. It shows that in the 2014/15 tax year, men paid £121.0 billion of the government’s £167.0 billion income tax receipts (72.5%), while women paid £45.5 billion (27.2%). The figures don’t add up to exactly 100% because of some crude rounding in the income tax receipts, leading to a discrepancy of £500 million. The bottom line? In 2014/15 men paid £75.5 billion more income tax than women, a new record.

The data for 2014/15 also gives an insight into the average income tax paid by tax-paying men and women:

• 17.6 million men paid £121.0 billion, an average of £6,875
• 13.1 million women paid £45.5 billion, an average of £3,473, barely half (50.5%) that paid by male taxpayers

Of course if we look at men and women as classes, rather than men and women as taxpayers, the relative contributions of men will be considerably higher, despite the fact that male unemployment has long been higher than female unemployment, and government initiatives to ‘support’ women into employment (often into male-typical lines, e.g. engineering, on which £30 milion of taxpayers’ money is being wasted).

The ‘Conservative’ government’s policy direction of driving women into more paid employment, which leads to a great deal of unhappiness among women and children, poorer outcomes for children, and higher unemployment among men – the latter point demonstrated by Belinda Brown in a paper in 2013, here – has been a failure even in terms of income tax generation. Women paid £43.6 billion in 2010/11, and £45.5 billion in 2014/15. The relative figures for men are £108 billion and £121.0 billion.

Year after year, the income tax gender gap increases.

In the space of just four years – from 2010/11 to 2014/15 – the income tax gender gap increased from £64.4 billion to £75.5 billion, an increase of 17.2%.

I regret to announce that Terrence Popp has been unable to obtain clearance from his employer for the leave necessary to attend the London conference. He is obviously disappointed by the situation, and I hope we have the pleasure of meeting him at future International Conferences on Men’s Issues.

We hope to announce an alternative MC – or MCs – at some point in the coming days.

Some notable makers of video pieces will be attending the London conference. They include:

• Alex Crosbie (6oodfella)
• 5hadowfax
• David Sherratt (Spinosaurus Kin)

I am pleased to add Mike Stephenson, ‘Dr Randomercam’, to the list of conference attendees. He’s a funny British video maker, who sometimes works with the estimable ladies of the Honey Badger Brigade.

To give you a flavour of his work, I’ve selected two videos. The first is the video with the most hits on his YouTube channel, 48 Female Privileges Confirmed by a Feminist (Part 2) (34:01). The feminist in question is a particularly odious mangina.

Mike is also a talented maker of animated cartoons, a piece taken at random being Dr Randomercam’s Beginner’s Guide to the Honey Badgers. Enjoy.

A recent survey revealed that over 25% of British adults get virtually all of their exposure to ‘news’ from the BBC, whether online or on TV or radio. Any BBC bias in relation to the EU referendum could well determine the outcome of Britain’s EU membership for a generation.

BBC bias towards the ‘Remain’ campaign is both predictable and outrageous, and in breach of its own editorial guidelines, which are consistently ignored. Our own experiences, and those of others, tell us that even highly detailed official complaints about breaches of editorial guidelines are virtually always futile.

A tip of the hat to David Keighley, a former BBC news producer, for this.

Another excellent paper on MGM, by Brian D Earp – who has written extensively on the subject – and Morten Frisch. The start of the paper:

ABSTRACT
In December of 2014, an anonymous working group under the United States’ Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) issued a draft of the first-ever federal recommendations regarding male circumcision. In accordance with the American Academy of Pediatrics’ circumcision policy from 2012 – but in contrast to the more recent 2015 policy from the Canadian Paediatric Society as well as prior policies (still in force) from medical associations in Europe and Australasia – the CDC suggested that the benefits of the surgery outweigh the risks. In this article, we provide a brief scientific and conceptual analysis of the CDC’s assessment of benefit versus risk, and argue that it deserves a closer look. Although we set aside the burgeoning bioethical debate surrounding the moral permissibility of performing non-therapeutic circumcisions on healthy minors, we argue that, from a scientific and medical perspective, current evidence suggests that such circumcision is not an appropriate public health measure for developed countries such as the United States. [my emphasis]

Introduction
Male circumcision is the surgical removal of part or all of the penile foreskin (Cold & Taylor, 1999). When circumcision is performed on children in the absence of penile disease, it raises a number of complex ethical issues, some of which have been discussed in the recent literature (e.g. Darby, 2015; Earp, 2015a, 2015b; Foddy, 2013; Frisch et al., 2013; Mazor, 2013; Munzer, 2015; Savulescu, 2013; Ungar-Sargon, 2015). Here, however, we focus exclusively on the empirical aspects of circumcision as they pertain to a published draft of the first-ever U.S. government policy on the subject, released in December of 2014.[1] Our central aim is to analyse the contention of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) that the prophylactic benefits of non-therapeutic male circumcision, as carried out prior to an age of consent, outweigh its associated risks in developed settings such as the United States, in light of the available evidence pertaining to this question.

Benefits versus risks
Do the benefits of circumcision outweigh the risks?[2] In recently proposed recommendations and an accompanying background report, an anonymous CDC working group has suggested that they do (2014a, 2014b). A similar claim was made in 2012 by an eight-member American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) task force (2012a, 2012b), despite contrary policies from British, mainland European, and Australasian medical associations, all of which remain in force (e.g. British Medical Association, 2006; Royal Australasian College of Physicians, 2010; Royal Dutch Medical Association, 2010; see also National Health Service of England, 2016). In addition, the Canadian Paediatric Society (CPS), which has historically endorsed the AAP position, instead explicitly rejected it in its most recent policy (Sorokan, Finlay, & Jefferies, 2015).

What could explain this lack of international agreement with the U.S. view? There are several possibilities. At least one concerns the fact that ‘The true incidence of complications after newborn circumcision is unknown’, as acknowledged by the AAP task force (2012b, p. e772). But since ‘complications’ are one of the foremost risks of circumcision, and since their ‘true incidence’ has not been firmly established (see below), it becomes difficult to see how the benefits of the surgery could logically be asserted to outweigh them (Darby, 2015). This is especially the case given that, on the other side of the scale, the likelihood as well as the magnitude of the purported benefits of circumcision themselves are in dispute.

A further possibility has to do with ongoing disagreements over how to define ‘complications’ in the first place (see AAP, 2012a), as well as with differences of opinion concerning the relative weight or value to assign to individual benefits and risks. As AAP task force member Dr Andrew L. Freedman stated in a recent editorial, in addition to having ‘insufficient information about the actual incidence and burden of nonacute complications’, the AAP’s 2012 assessment of benefits versus risks also suffered due to the ‘lack of a universally accepted metric to accurately measure or balance the risks and benefits’ (Freedman, 2016, p. 1).

To see the significance of this problem, which applies equally to the 2014 analysis by the CDC, consider the example of a modest reduction in the absolute risk of contracting certain sexually transmitted infections, a health benefit that is frequently attributed to – primarily adult – circumcision (see below). Considering that (1) children are not at risk of contracting sexually transmitted infections prior to sexual debut (an event that typically comes after the development of a capacity to provide informed consent to self-affecting interventions); (2) there are alternative modes of prevention that are less invasive, as well as less risky and more effective, than circumcision (i.e. safe sex practices when one does become sexually active); and (3) many of these infections can be treated effectively if they do occur, what is the weight or value that one should assign to this particular  benefit?

For example, should it be considered ‘worth’ the risk, however slight, of a surgical mishap that causes permanent damage to the penile glans? Is it ‘worth’ the loss of the penile prepuce itself, which is a 100% risk of circumcision? Is it ‘worth’ the risk of removing too much penile skin (i.e. more than was intended), leading to painful erections later in life (see e.g. van Duyn & Warr, 1962; Krill, Palmer, & Palmer, 2011; Thorup, Thorup, & Ifaoui, 2013)? The answer to these questions cannot be ‘objectively’ determined (see Johnsdotter, 2013). Instead, they will depend upon such factors as how much value one places on having intact versus modified genitalia, how willing one is to engage in safe sex practices (even if one is circumcised), and how much risk one feels comfortable taking on when it comes to a surgery performed on a physically and symbolically sensitive part of one’s body (Adams & Moyer, 2015, p. 723; see also Earp, 2016).[3]

Finally, it has been argued that the appropriate counterbalance to the potential benefits of circumcision is not only the risk of surgical complications (whatever those turn out to be), but also its short-term, intermediate, and long-term adverse consequences, both physical and psychological (Darby, 2015). Due to a lack of adequate research into these questions, however, the entire spectrum of potential circumcision harms (i.e. surgical risks plus additional negative consequences) has never been fully described. Moreover, at least some of these potential harms are likely to be subjective in nature (e.g. feelings of loss or resentment; see Darby & Cox, 2009; Goldman, 1999; Hammond, 1999), and therefore highly variable across individuals, as well as difficult to quantify in a meaningful way (Darby, 2015; Darby & Cox, 2009; Johnsdotter, 2013).

From pp.9,10 of the paper:

Summary and conclusion
In this brief analysis, we have identified numerous scientific and conceptual shortcomings in the 2012 circumcision policy from the AAP, as well as the more recent draft guidelines issued by the CDC. With respect to the latter, these included: (1) failure to provide a thorough description of the normal anatomy and functions of the penile structure being removed at circumcision (i.e. the foreskin); (2) failure to consider the intrinsic value to some men of having an unmodified genital organ; (3) undue reliance on findings from sub-Saharan Africa concerning circumcision of adult males (as opposed to infants or children); (4) uncritical reliance on a prima facie implausible benefit-risk analysis performed by a self-described circumcision advocate (see Davey et al., in press); (5) reliance on misreported statistics to downplay the problem of pain in the youngest of boys; (6) reliance on incomplete register data to assess the frequency of short-term post-operative complications associated with circumcision, leading to a likely underestimation of their true frequency; and (7) serious underestimation of the late-occurring harms of circumcision presenting months to years after the operation (most notably meatal stenosis). In light of these considerations, we believe that the CDC’s overall assessment of benefits versus
harms (‘risks’) of the surgery should be interpreted with extraordinary caution.

The apparent underassessment of meatal stenosis alone, possibly the most common lateoccurring complication after neonatal circumcision, means that the CDC’s claim of markedly lower complication rates in boys circumcised as infants (‘less than ½ per cent’), compared to boys circumcised at ages 1–9 years (‘approximately 9%’) and those circumcised at age 10 years and older (‘approximately 5%’) (2014a, 2014b), is almost certainly inaccurate.

Indeed, with reported rates of meatal stenosis in neonatally circumcised boys in the 5–20% range, and with estimates of clinically significant procedural pain in around 30% (and some level of post-operative pain and discomfort in most, if not all newborn boys undergoing the operation), the least problematic age to circumcise a boy (if at all), even from a purely medical standpoint, may well be when he is old enough to decide for himself. This conclusion is supported by the recent evidence showing that very few genitally intact boys – 0.5% according to the new population-based study in Denmark (Sneppen & Thorup, 2016) – will need a circumcision for medical reasons before the age of 18.

Episode 31 of The Fiamengo File. Professor Fiamengo will be speaking at the London conference on the topic, ‘How Feminism is Destroying Higher Education’. If you haven’t already ordered your conference ticket(s), you have until 12:00 GMT Sunday, 5 June, to do so – here.

Shortly after 09:00 today I’ll be taking part in a discussion on Stephen Jardine’s show on BBC Radio Scotland, concerning the revelation yesterday that members of Muirfield golf club in Scotland had voted to keep women from becoming club members. Our blog piece on the matter is here. The topline question being asked will be:

Are you embarrassed by the decision?

I invite you to call in with your thoughts, the number is 0500 929500.

You can listen to BBC Radio Scotland through this link, click on ‘Listen live’, and don’t forget to turn off your computer (or radio) if you get through to speak.

I look forward to hearing your views. We’ll be posting a link to the full programme, including the phone-in.

Our thanks to H for this. He writes:

At last! Some men have strapped on a pair, and drawn a line in the sand. I didn’t expect the line to be drawn in a bunker on a prestigious golf course, but it’s a start!

The (BBC) article includes a comment from Nicola Sturgeon, who introduced a gender-balanced cabinet regardless of individuals’ merit, shortly after being appointed as First Minister. The daft trout tweeted:

Scotland has women leaders in every walk of life. It is 2016. This is indefensible.